Government Spends $890k on Empty Bank Accounts

The United States government is spending around 890 thousand tax dollars this year to keep empty government grant bank accounts open.

When a project is funded by tax dollars, a new bank account is opened with the allotted amount of money.

After a project has finished, the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB is supposed to audit the project, look at how the money was spent, and close the account.

Some projects would take a very long time to account for all of the funding, so the bank accounts stay open, costing 5 dollars and 42 cents a month, which amounts to 65 dollars a year per account.

With around 13 thousand 7 hundred of these kinds of accounts, the dollars add up and the empty bank accounts turn out to be a drain on tax dollars.

There have been some steps to close the accounts, but there is a lot of progress yet to be made.

According to Danny Werfel, the controller for the OMB: “Agencies have made noteworthy progress so far, with the number of zero-balance accounts falling by more than 50 percent since the end of fiscal year 2011.”

What do you think the US government should do to fix these problems and save tax dollars?